Jessica Baker

I am the Universe

            What is a hero?  It is, like many words, something more difficult to define than it first appears.  A hero could be defined as a man who acts altruistically, who risks himself for the good of others.  Perhaps a hero is someone who is kind, helpful, always doing small, good things, creating that essential feeling of community.  He protects innocence, defeats evil, and always gets the girl.  These definitions are true enough, but they lack a certain spark: these heroes show us how to be good people, how to act as productive members of society, but in the end, they show us the best way to fulfill our prescribed positions in the world.  They only show us the best way to be what we already are. 

            There is, however, another definition for hero; one that allows us to dream.  In his essay “The American Scholar,” Emerson writes that the hero “lives for us, and we live in him” (American Scholar 99).  In this moment, a deep and compelling idea of a hero is born into the American consciousness: a man who goes beyond the bounds of society, who shows us what we might be, instead of what we are.  Emerson believes common men will follow this man, seeing the potential of their own greatness in him.  Emerson does not, however, write this idea of the hero in a vacuum, but follows in the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton.  Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, goes against the natural order of the world, dares to do more than any other man.  Milton’s Satan also chooses defiance – this time against God.  Shakespeare explores Macbeth’s relationship to his fellow men, while Milton explores man’s relationship with God.  Both characters are independent individuals, relying on their own impulses instead of an imposed order. 

            While Emerson certainly creates a dream for Americans to reach for, he seems to ignore the tragic nature and consequences of Macbeth’s and Satan’s heroism.  Macbeth gains power by murdering his king, only to live out the rest of his life expecting someone to do to him what he has done to Duncan.  Satan’s actions lead first to his fall, and then to the Fall of Man.  Nothing good comes of their self-reliance.  It is Melville who applies Emerson’s ideals to Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, who comes to embody not only the Romantic characteristics put forth by Emerson, but the consequences of such characteristics as well.  Along with this, Melville creates a very different Divine Soul than Emerson, and shows how this alters the relationship between man and the Divine.  Ahab is not what Emerson would have hoped for: rather than communing with the Divine, Ahab hunts it, too obsessed to see reason, to see that there is no reason.  While Emerson builds an ideal man, connected with the Universe, defined by solitude, self-reliance, and the quest – limited only by the iron wire of temperament – Melville uses Moby Dick to portray a different view of the Universe, and to create Captain Ahab as a tragic hero to critique these ideals and show the consequences of Emerson’s hero.

It is clear that Emerson’s ideal character is connected with the Universe, has experienced it beyond what the average man experiences.  But just what Universe is man interacting with?  First, it becomes apparent that Emerson uses “God” not as an almighty Father, but as a word interchangeable with “Universe,” “Universal Being,” “Divine,” “Divine Soul,” and other like terms.  This divine figure takes on an abstract, platonic feeling – it is more the essence of everything good, beautiful, and creative in the world than it is a thinking being. 

Yet, despite this abstraction of God, Emerson’s approach shares similarities with his Puritan heritage.  The relationship is still viewed in terms of God and individual man.  Although Emerson is not so worried about salvation, he focuses on the question, “How do God and I interact with each other?”  Emphasizing the individual, there is no question of God and community, of God and country.  Emerson’s version of “the Universe and Me” is idealistic: he can converse with the Universe, commune with it, be at peace with it.  Emerson expresses himself as part of the Universe. He can lose himself within the Universe – moreover, this is, in fact, a goal.  He is one with the Universe, and yet still himself: “I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God” (Nature 39).  Emerson’s Universe is awe-inspiring and beautiful, but it is not beyond him.  He is a piece of the Divine, and so stands equal to it, capable of experiencing it without negative consequence.  There is no danger here.

However, Melville found in Paradise Lost “a traditional theodicy which stood in absolute contradiction to the optimistic theodicy of Emerson,” Glenn writes in “Melville and the Sublime in Moby Dick” (Glenn 177).  In Moby Dick, Melville tries to fit Emerson and Milton into a single theodicy, and in so doing paints a rather different picture of both man and the Universe.  Emerson’s ideas are abstract; he never actually applies them to the world around him.  Melville, however, creates a character according to Emerson’s specifications and then lets him go on a whale ship.  The Pequod encounters Nature – is surrounded by Nature – but it is not quite the same Nature that Emerson found in the well-settled areas surrounding Concord, Massachusetts.  For Melville, Nature – and the Divine inherent in Nature – is indefinite, immense, all colors and colorless, blank, and above all “heartless” (Moby Dick 165).  Through the use of Emerson’s Romantic characteristics, Melville builds a man who is a hero.  Yet, through these same characteristics, that hero is doomed.

Melville’s version of interaction between man and the Divine is not, as discussed above, like Emerson’s.  Glenn writes of Milton, “According to this older theodicy, man is separated infinitely from God” (Glenn 177).  Seeing again this contradiction between Milton and Emerson, Melville places an Emersonian character in a Universe governed by a Divinity much closer to Milton’s God than Emerson’s.  Ahab is fiery, bent on “thrusting through the wall” (Moby Dick 140) between this world and the next.  But the Divine does not care: it is “joyous, heartless” and “indifferent” (Moby Dick 321-2).  In this Universe, Booth writes in “Standing Up to God,” “In this vast, uncontrollable ocean, each man has one small … island” (Booth 38) – he is nothing in the grand scheme of things.  Ahab can hunt the whale all he wants, but Moby Dick only appears when he chooses.  Ahab defies the Divine, fights and rages against God, but against the great expansiveness of first the ocean, and then the whale itself, it all feels so futile in the end, when Ahab is “helpless in the very jaws he hated” (Moby Dick 410).  This version of the Divine, while beautiful, is simply beyond the understanding of man.

In keeping with American tradition, Emerson emphasizes the importance of the individual.  Although all beings are a piece of the Universe, he consistently speaks of a single man growing beyond the rest.  A man must trust his own Self, “must be an university of knowledges” (American Scholar 103).  Individualism gives Emerson’s ideal man the ability to possess the above characteristics.  Through this faith in the Self – to the point of worship – a single man is content in his own company.  He is brave enough to stand against society when he disagrees, and he is confident enough to go out into the world without fear.  If a man can fulfill this ideal, Emerson writes that “the huge world will come round him” (American Scholar 104), and he will achieve greatness.

            In his essays, Emerson urges the new generation of his time to break away from tradition and the “sepulchers of the fathers,” (Nature 35).  He asks for originality and curiosity.  Through his arguments and discussions, Emerson builds a specific character.  He creates the image of a new man whose qualities become representative of Romantic figures.  Most prominently, Emerson advocates solitude and, inherently, independence.  It is when a man is alone – truly alone, preferably in Nature – that he can touch the Sublime, and channel it.  “The mind is open,” he writes in “Nature” (37), and man can know himself.  He takes this even further in “Self-Reliance,” writing that “it is easy in solitude to live after our own [opinion]; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (Self-Reliance 181).  Here, a man must be able to do more than know himself in solitude.  He must keep that same self in society as well; he must be true to his internal Self all the time, no matter who speaks against him. 

Captain Ahab’s solitude is made clear in his absence for so long at the beginning of Ishmael’s voyage: “as for Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin” (Moby Dick 93).  He is often in his cabin, and even after he comes out he barely interacts with his crew.  As one so withdrawn, he gains an air of mystery, power, and greatness; he seems to be more than he is, more than just a man.  Even at Ishmael’s very first sighting of Ahab, the Captain is positioned above his crew: he “stood upon his quarter-deck” (Moby Dick 108).  The description which follows depicts in no way a common man.  Ahab is a bronze statue, Perseus, and a great old trunk of a tree.  His appearances even after this are sparse.  He shows up only at dramatic moments – the more intense the moment, the more involved Ahab tends to be.  For example, when another ship shows up, Ahab is on deck.  For some of the ships, he sends messengers out, and for other ships he accepts messengers.  But for the most significant ships – the Samuel Enderby and the Rachel – he either boards the other ship or allows the captain onto his own ship.  As Myers writes in “Captain Ahab’s Discovery,” “Ahab is the lord of his little universe, the Pequod; all his world must rise or fall with him” (Myers 27).  The world is only moved to action by Ahab’s presence in it. 

While his infrequent appearances cause the crew to magnify his image and grow to fear and adore him, Ahab’s isolation allows him emotional freedom from his followers.  Emerson never describes how the ideal man should interact with society once he has broken free from it, and this lack of direction is reflected in the consequences of Ahab’s elevation.  Captain Ahab shows no particular care for his crew.  On the contrary, he is prepared to drag them all to their deaths if that is what it takes to kill Moby Dick.  Because of his power over his crew, as Slochower writes in “The Myth of Democratic Expectancy,” “Ahab is the single ruler over his social universe.  All must submit to his will and do his bidding to the point of jeopardizing their collective existence” (Slochower 263).  Through the combination of his crew’s submission and his own detachment, both brought about by Ahab’s solitude, Ahab is free to be ruthless, to act on his impulses just as Emerson advocates, but the darkness of which he could not have imagined. 

However, it is also part of what damns him.  He is left without anchors, without connections to humanity.  His original encounter with Moby Dick leaves him a raving lunatic who must be restrained in a straight-jacket (Moby Dick 156).  He has, like Pip, witnessed the infinite, heartless Divine.  But, instead of being overwhelmed, instead of worshipping what he sees, “he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it” (Moby Dick 156).  Ahab’s defiance is so strong-willed that his desire for revenge consumes all other aspects of his character.  It gives him a focus, a lens through which to view the world; it allows him to survive.  Ahab maintains his only tie to reality through this burning self-consumption: he rarely eats or sleeps, spends all his time brooding with dark clouds over his brow; he is like the sun “and needs no sustenance but what’s in himself” (298).  But in becoming so intensely focused, he is unable to change his course even when he can see that he is doomed if he continues.  Without any human connections, Ahab has nothing to hold onto, no one to pull him to safety.

In order to emphasize Ahab’s isolation, Melville pairs Queequeg with Ishmael.  Both Ishmael and Queequeg are loners, part of a world in which they have to create a place for themselves rather than one they were born into.  Although Ishmael is at first terrified by Queequeg’s appearance, they quickly become “a cosy, loving pair” (Moby Dick 57).  Because of this connection, Ishmael writes that “No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.  This soothing savage had redeemed it” (Moby Dick 56).  In the end, it is literally Queequeg’s coffin, a small piece of wood in the whole, huge ocean – one hint of humanity amidst the immensity of God – that separates Ishmael from Pip and Ahab.  It is this human connection that saves not only Ishmael’s life but his sanity as well, providing sympathy to counter the indifference of Melville’s Divine. 

Nothing dampens the burning of Ahab’s soul.  No one curbs his anger or distracts him from revenge.  Since he cannot reach out, since there is no one for him to reach out for, he is caught within himself.  When Starbuck first attempts to appeal to Ahab using reason (Moby Dick 139), he is more or less subjugated and overpowered by the intensity of Ahab’s will.  Ahab is mad, and no connection can be established with him through reason.  Later, Ahab does establish a relationship with Pip: “‘Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings’” (Moby Dick 392).  However, this connection is not born out of any aspect of humanity.  Rather, it comes from a shared encounter with the Divine and a shared loss of Self in that meeting, and so Pip cannot pull Ahab away from his chosen course.  For a brief moment, Ahab feels his obsession wane in the presence of Pip: “‘There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady’” (Moby Dick 399).  Given time, Pip and Ahab could have used even a connection made of madness to save themselves.  But Ahab’s madness is self-perpetuating and self-consuming: “‘…and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health,’” (Moby Dick 399).  He needs his madness to complete his mad quest, and he pushes even Pip away in pursuit of this end.

Starbuck tries one final time to pull Captain Ahab away from his futile vengeance, this time trying to reach out to him on an emotional level.  Reminding Ahab of his wife and child, he pleads “let us home!” (Moby Dick 406).  Ahab is moved, feels at last connected to Starbuck as one man to another in this moment.  He wants to give up his revenge, realizes that the impulses driving him are “against all natural lovings and longings” (Moby Dick 406), and he asks where these impulses come from.  Ahab shows compassion for Starbuck, tells him to stay on the ship where he believes he will be safe.  He loses some of his reckless abandon – he is no longer willing to sacrifice everything for his vengeance.  But Starbuck’s appeal comes too late to turn Ahab back completely; there is no answer for Ahab’s questions, and he has already made his choices.  There is nothing left to him except his unnatural drive. 

The entire essay Self-Reliance demands that man cease his conformity, depend only on himself, break away from the masses which suppress his genius.  No matter what a man’s impulses are, he is obliged to trust them: “… if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil” (Self-Reliance 179).  Only in following these impulses can man fulfill his potential.  As Emerson praises this potential for greatness in all men, he divorces greatness from morality.  “There is man and his virtues,” he writes (Self-Reliance 180), going on to argue that good deeds only serve to reassure a man of his own worth.  The character Emerson builds here, then, is not necessarily a valuable contributor to society, not someone who works within the system.  Instead, this is a man beyond morality, driven by impulses apparently superior, more divine than the laws of man because they are drawn directly from Nature and, thus, from the Divine Soul.  A man with this independent, self-confident manner would be, according to Emerson, better than his fellow men who had not yet realized their own potential.

Along with keeping himself separate from his crew, Ahab is entirely self-reliant.  His internal impulses drive him – namely, a desire for revenge.  It does not matter if what drives him is good or evil, if it is logical or insane, he follows it anyway.  When Starbuck, the representative of good, normal society, stands up against Ahab, tells him hunting Moby Dick is madness, Ahab counters that the whale “tasks me; he heaps me” (Moby Dick 140).  Ahab not only remains faithful to his own views, he is so powerful and insistent that his crew enthusiastically agrees to follow him, and even Starbuck – representing, on one level, social conformity – becomes obedient to Ahab.  Unlike in Emerson’s writing, however, Melville depicts Captain Ahab as so self-reliant that he becomes self-obsessed: “The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab” (Moby Dick 332).  All he can think of is his own injury, his own revenge, and his own godliness. 

Melville uses Ahab’s self-reliance to examine ideas of Evil.  While Emerson argues that the only evil a man can do is conform, Melville shows more realistic results of such extreme self-reliance.  Even though Ahab knows he is “damned in the midst of Paradise,” and he says, “I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” (Moby Dick 143), this does not change his mind, does not pull him away from his chosen destiny.  Ahab’s impulses tell him to hunt a whale for vengeance, to defy God.  In his defiance, Ahab is reminiscent of Milton’s Satan: his fall is “Self-tempted, self-depraved” (Paradise Lost III line 130) and through his ambition to be on equal terms with the Divine, Ahab adopts an attitude similar to Satan’s “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n” (Paradise Lost I line 263).  He is associated with images of scorching heat, fire, and blood, and he is followed by Fedallah “the devil in disguise” (Moby Dick 259).  Ahab is associated almost entirely with symbols of evil, even his crew suspects Fedallah might “want to kidnap Captain Ahab” (Moby Dick 260).  He knows he is damned.  He insists on his quest anyway, insists on following his impulses to the grave.  Worse, there are serious consequences to his choices: Ahab takes his crew down with him.

He struggles against the impossible, immense Divinity, demanding answers and reasons.  Captain Ahab needs an explanation for why it is his leg that has been lost, why God has chosen him to suffer.  As Booth writes, “Ahab is bewildered, personally affronted, heartbroken… that divinity should so mark him for misfortune, should pick him out of all mankind” (Booth 38-39).  Ahab commands a dead whale, “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” (Moby Dick 249), but of course there is no answer, no response from the heartless Universe.  Ahab, like Satan, cannot win.  The difference lies in Ahab’s need.  He glimpses the futility of his actions in realizing his own madness (Moby Dick 157), but he needs so badly to provoke some response from the Universe, to know that he is not insignificant, that he continues.  “Ahab is hurt as men are hurt when a friend or parent… betrays them” (Booth 38), and he reacts, claiming godliness and spewing blasphemy, like a child throwing a tantrum. 

But Melville prevents his audience from simply condemning Ahab.  Whether he is evil or not, Ahab is human.  “Ahab dropped a tear into the sea” (Moby Dick 405), showing in typical 19^th century style that he still feels, can still be moved by the world despite his madness.  Moreover, he has hope of redemption.  He can always turn back, always give up the chase.  He can always listen to Starbuck.  Captain Ahab, driven by his impulses, chooses, repeatedly, in the face of bad omens and warnings, to continue hunting Moby Dick.

            Emerson also emphasizes in his ideal character the need for experience through quests.  His language throughout his essays contrasts the hidden versus the seen, the known versus the unknown, and some need or desire to discover the secrets of the world.  The very first paragraph of “Nature” demands the pursuit of the new – “new lands, new men, new thoughts” (Nature 35).  A metaphor of the eye and of sight is used continuously (up to and including “I become a transparent eyeball” (Nature 39)), and words like “occult” make numerous appearances in Emerson’s essays.  These hidden parts of the Universe are meant to be uncovered, and man is meant to seek these answers.  In “The American Scholar,” Emerson tells his audience to converse with and experience Nature in order to learn about themselves (American Scholar 85). 

In the second part of his three influences, while discussing the place of books in a scholar’s development, he writes that although many people spend their lives worshipping past heroes, the “genius looks forward” (American Scholar 89) – that is, he chases after an undiscovered thing.  In the third section, Emerson writes that what a scholar needs to truly become great, to grow above the average man, is action.  He must go out and experience the world.  Both the mind and the body must be alive in Emerson’s ideal man for this experience to allow the scholar to grow.  As a result, according to Emerson, the man “who has put forth his total strength… has the richest return of wisdom” (American Scholar 93) – action allows for expansion.  In seeking this expansion, a man seeks the Universe.  In experiencing the world – and the Universe – he is able to connect to it, and essentially transcend.  Through this, the line between man and the Divine is blurred. 

Captain Ahab’s defining action is his quest: it is what gives him purpose and direction.  Without his absolute need to continue seeking Moby Dick, and his ability to do so, Ahab would simply unravel, a defeated and self-consuming man: “Once [Ahab] had identified the whale as the cause of evil, his fierce, proud spirit refused to accept the necessity of defeat and suffering,” (Myers 26). He has witnessed the Divine in his first encounter with Moby Dick; he could very easily become like Pip, babbling and lost and without Self.  Resisting this fate, however, Ahab focuses all of himself on this idea of seeking out the whale he hates.  Even Starbuck says Ahab “would be more hideous than a caged tiger” (Moby Dick 387) if the captain were prevented from chasing Moby Dick.  Without the quest holding Ahab together, there is nothing to save him from being swallowed up by the Divine.

 In Emerson’s work, this idea of the quest, of going into and through the world, allows a man to expand himself and to become greater than he was before.  Ahab does indeed become greater, does in fact become partly divine himself: he is an “ungodly, god-like man” (Moby Dick 78), and becomes increasingly god-like as the book goes on until Ishmael begins referring to him as lord instead of Captain.  In part, this is only a perception of Ahab – he views himself as equal to the Divine, and so his crew comes to see him this way as well.  However, Ahab has, in his previous quest, encountered the ultimate experience: he, like Pip, witnesses “the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities” (Moby Dick 321), and in these he sees his own universal insignificance. 

Unwilling to accept this, Ahab fights his way back from complete insanity determined to find a reason for his existence, determined to make the Universe notice him.   The quest is for more than vengeance: “the terrible quest of Ahab and the Pequod for the great white whale, Moby Dick, may be identified with the quest for the sublime” (Glenn 165).  Myers echoes this in his own writing: “Throughout [Ahab’s] pursuit of the whale he is tortured by the desire to foresee and understand” (Myers 28).  Ahab makes himself distinct, ties himself to the Divine through the white whale bone he uses for a leg.  Both the leg and Moby Dick are white, a color Ishmael ties directly to the supernatural and otherworldly in “The Whiteness of the Whale.”  Ahab quests not only in search of vengeance and an understanding of the Divine, but Ahab also searches in vain for the part of his body he lost, and the part of his soul the Divine took. 

            As a final touch bestowed upon his ideal man, Emerson places the iron thread of temperament.  In “Nature,” Emerson introduces the idea of “colors of the spirit” (39).  That is, Nature reflects a man’s internal mood, for better or for worse.  According to this view, the world is subjective – a man sees what his temperament projects onto the world.  However, Emerson makes no move to qualify how a man sees until “Experience.”  Here, he gives shape to the colors: “moods like a string of beads… many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue” (Experience 288-9).  Rather than Nature simply wearing colors, it seems more like man is wearing the colors over his eyes like a pair of sunglasses, blocking out what he does not want to see.  And then, Emerson explains the factor that determines what colored lenses an individual sees through.  “Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung” (Experience 289), and each man is trapped on his own iron wire, limited to the beads already in place, unable to see the world any other way.  While mood can shift, temperament cannot.  The great tragedy of this is that temperament “shuts us in a prison of glass” (Experience 290) which prevents each man from seeing the true nature of the world as well as of other men.  Temperament separates and divides each man from others, keeps his Self distinct from the Universe.

Yet Melville takes the idea of temperament as an iron wire to a conclusion Emerson does not seem to have considered: what happens when a man’s temperament is madness?  Captain Ahab is bound by the same iron wire as Emerson’s ideal man.  Ahab wears an “Iron Crown” on his “steel skull” – “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, where on my soul is grooved to run” (Moby Dick 143).  Associated with metal throughout the book, even his soul is eventually described as iron (Moby Dick 401).  For Melville, the iron does not only represent something unchanging, but something driving and unstoppable.    It does not matter what lies before Ahab, what tries to pull him away, “Naught’s an obstacle… to the iron way” (Moby Dick 143).  Ahab cannot change his temperament, nor does he express any desire to change until the end, when he sees what his temperament has cost others, Starbuck in particular.  Moreover, “The intensity of Ahab's purpose and its concentration on a single object, Moby Dick, make him a striking and dramatic example of the common fate of man” (Myers 24).  In being more intense than the common man’s, Ahab’s temperament emphasizes his quest above the struggles of other men, highlighting his fate so that it resonates with all people.

However, while Emerson depicts moods and temperament as negative because they separate man from the rest of the world, they become for Melville the only things saving Ahab even while they damn him.  When Pip experiences the infinite Divine, nothing stands between him and what he sees, nothing shields him.  He is “pleasant, genial… Pip loved life” (Moby Dick 319).  But when he jumps out of the boat, he is left with an “intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity” (Moby Dick 321) for an hour.  He has no human connections, no strong will to save him.  Nothing separates Pip from the Divine, and for Melville, once a man merges his Self with the Universe, there is no going back: Pip does not know who he is; the Self is lost. 

Ahab, however, has a strong, stubborn temperament: “The light that obsesses and destroys him, manifest[s] from within” (Glenn 180).  He fights, refuses to let his Self be lost, swallowed by the Universe, refuses even to believe he is small enough to be swallowed in such a way.  The only way he can do this, however, is to view the Universe through a lens – more than likely a black lens of hate and rage, and his iron wire is such that he stays in this mood.  By looking through a lens, Ahab shields himself, sees only part of the infinite instead of all of it.  Because of this, he remains distinct, but he is also cut off from his fellow man so long as he continues to view the world through this particular lens.  In not connecting with the Universe, Ahab is also failing to connect with people: he cannot experience the calm peacefulness in “A Squeeze of the Hand,” never “allay the heat of anger,” never “squeeze ourselves universally” (Moby Dick 323).  When Ahab’s mood changes to something softer, he is able to connect for a moment with Starbuck.  This change is his chance at redemption, but his temperament overwhelms his mood and drives him on.  Even after attacking Moby Dick twice, Ahab tells Starbuck, “‘I’ve felt strangely moved to thee… But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand… Ahab is for ever Ahab” (Moby Dick 418).  Here, Ahab defines himself as his need to kill Moby Dick – no matter what else he feels, this drive is his core, and it cannot be moved or changed.  Even while it leads him to his death and the death of his crew, Ahab’s temperament is what holds him together.

In conclusion, Captain Ahab is at once Emerson’s ideal man and Melville’s critique of that ideal.  He embodies the characteristics of the Romantic hero, yet his struggle is futile, he is evil, and his end is tragic.  It becomes apparent, however, that Ahab’s greatness comes not out of morality, or even out of what he actually achieves: Ahab’s heroism comes from what he dares to reach for.  He, like Ishmael’s description of whale tails, is “snatching at the highest heaven” (Moby Dick 295).  He does what the rest of us dream of doing, but dare not do.  Because of this, his crew can live vicariously through him, even swear their souls to him to further Ahab’s own goal.  Melville shows that Emerson is right – the common man will follow the hero, seeing his own greatness in him.  But at the same time, he shows exactly what this means, what such power is capable of, and the extent to which men are willing to go in order to experience the Divine through their heroes.

Works Cited

Primary Sources:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  Nature and Selected Essays.  New York:  Penguin Books, 2003.

Melville, Herman.  Moby-Dick. 1952.  A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition.  New York: London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Milton, John.  Paradise Lost.  1674.  A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition.  New York: London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993.

Secondary Sources:

Booth, Thornton Y.  “Moby Dick: Standing Up to God.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17.1 University of California Press. (1962): 33-43. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2932815>.

Glenn, Barbara. "Melville and the Sublime in Moby-Dick." American Literature 48.2 Duke University Press. (1976): 165-82. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2925070>.

Myers, Henry Alonzo.  “Captain Ahab’s Discovery: the Tragic Meaning of Moby Dick.” The New England Quarterly, 15.1. The England Quarterly, Inc. (1942): 15-34.  <http://www.jstor.org/stable/360228>.

Slochower, Harry. “Moby Dick: The Myth of Democratic Expectancy.” American Quarterly, 2.3. The Johns Hopkins University Press. (1950): 259-269. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3031342>.